The screenshots and screen recordings nobody deletes

A screenshot is a few hundred kilobytes and a screen recording is a few hundred megabytes. Both go to the same place by default, neither is ever cleaned up, and after a couple of years the folder holding them is one of the easiest wins on the whole disk.

Where they go

By default, the Desktop. Which is why the folder nobody thinks of as storage is often several gigabytes:

ls ~/Desktop | grep -c "^Screenshot"
du -sh ~/Desktop

If you have changed the location, macOS remembers it here:

defaults read com.apple.screencapture location

Recordings are the ones that matter

A minute of screen recording at retina resolution is roughly 100 to 200 MB, and more with a second display. A handful of recordings made to demonstrate something, kept in case they were needed, outweighs a thousand screenshots.

# Every screen recording, largest first
find ~ -name "Screen Recording*" -type f 2>/dev/null \
  | xargs du -sh 2>/dev/null | sort -rh | head

The settings worth changing once

• Send them somewhere that is not the Desktop. In the screenshot toolbar, press Shift, Command, 5, then Options, and pick a folder. A Desktop full of files also slows the Finder down.
• Turn off the drop shadow, which adds transparent border to every window capture: defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true, then log out and back in.
• Use HEIC instead of PNG if your workflow allows it: defaults write com.apple.screencapture type heic. Roughly half the size, and every Mac app reads it.

The quick clear

In Finder, search the Desktop for Screenshot, sort by Date Added, and select everything older than a year. Almost none of it will be missed, and it goes to the Trash rather than being deleted, so a mistake is recoverable.

If the Desktop turns out to be small, the space is somewhere less obvious. Reading the storage bar narrows it to a category, and the safest order to free 100 GB works through the categories that are usually larger.